Australia’s largest customer-owned financial institution’s total value of new loans settled increased 5.2% from $990 million to $1.04 billion.
Credit Union Australia CEO Chris Whitehead said the lender’s solid loan growth over the half year period ending 31 December 2013 was principally driven by competitive pricing on its fixed and variable home loans.
“[This is] a strategy that also helped us achieve a record first half year for home loan issues.
“This result was tempered by significantly higher-than-usual loan repayments which ultimately saw our overall loan growth fall in-line with system. However, we remain on track to continue record levels of home loan issues through to the end of the financial year.”
CUA announced record consolidated assets of $10.2 billion for the half year period, and maintained a strong capital adequacy ratio of 14.8%.
However, reportable net profit after tax was down 18.2% on the previous corresponding period, at $27.9 million.
Whitehead said this was due to “one-off” costs incurred while implementing its core banking system over the first half of this financial year, including training staff.
“It is the special one-off contributions that boosted our bottom line in the first half of the 2013 financial year that largely accounted for the decline in our year-on-year profit this period.”
While these one-off costs adversely impacted year-on-year profit, Whitehead said CUA reached the predicted $10 billion in consolidated assets.
CUA said it has maintained a differential of at least 50 basis points on its standard variable home loan to the average of the Big Four banks’ equivalent product since April 2010.
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